Retiring Our Legacy Plugins

A lot has changed since we first launched back in 2005. Back then, WPMU DEV was a simple plugin repository with a handful of products and our CEO James Farmer was working out of his garden shed, “scrabbling about in the WordPress forums, just basically trying to find shit there.”

Fast forward 10 years and we now offer more than +100 plugins, security and performance optimization tools, an email opt-in plugin, 24/7 expert support, managed cloud backups, an amazing community of users, Jobs and Pros, The Hub, The Academy, WP Checkup, and soon we’ll be offering enterprise hosting.

Phew!

These products and services usher in a new and improved era for WPMU DEV as we provide more and more services that members are asking for. But while we have grown considerably and we have more members and more people on our team than ever before, something’s gotta give. So after careful consideration, we have decided to retire the following plugins:

What This Means for Customers

Will my product still work?

Yes. The retirement of these plugins from WPMU DEV will not stop them from working on your websites. Any plugin you download from WPMU DEV is covered under the GPL, which means it’s yours to keep for life. If you are happy with how these plugins are running on your site, you don’t need to do anything at this point.

In-fact, we have also opened them up publicly on GitHub so anyone who wishes to further their development can easily do so and share with others. You can find all retired products here: https://github.com/wpmudev

Can I still download these products?

Why We Are Retiring These Products

High cost of development

The fact is, maintaining 140+ plugins is a lot of work and a considerable amount of development time goes into adding new features and keeping plugins up-to-date, bug-free, and compatible with the latest version of WordPress.

Unfortunately, the plugins we are retiring have too few users to justify ongoing development time. It’s essential that we retire legacy plugins to allow for more resources to be shifted to innovation, and to building products and services that provide greater value to members.

We need to keep up with the changing pace of the web

In order to remain competitive, in recent months we have delivered more brand new services that members have asked for than ever before, increasing the value of your membership.
We want to keep the cost of a WPMU DEV membership as low as possible and this means putting our product development focus on products and services that have greater benefit for members.

High cost of support time

While there are users who continue to use these plugins, usage levels don’t justify the level of support we provide for them. Our support team is filled with friendly folks who live all over the world and are available 24/7 to help you out. But when they are preoccupied answering questions for members using legacy plugins, it takes away from the time they could be spending providing answers to questions that benefit more members.

Questions? Concerns? Get in Touch

We understand that you may have questions, and we’d love to answer them. Feel free to get in touch with our support team: